Internet users residing in Southeast Asia have been suffering through depressingly slow internet speed. As someone who survives (barely) on already snail-paced Streamyx in Malaysia, it has been a rough few days for me. Sites are taking longer than usual to load with a higher rate of this page happening.

Meanwhile, Internet at work has slowed to a standstill, and its too bad that it doesn’t mean work stops. A quick search showed that a faulty Asia-America Gateway (AAG) submarine cable could be the reason for the slower-than-usual internet speed. The AAG cable is a long submarine communications cable system that links the USA mainland across the Pacific Ocean via Guam and Hawaii with landing points at several countries such as the USA, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Why is Internet So Slow?!

Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) explained that they will do all they can to fix this as soon as possible – which could be half a month later. According to their statement on Thursday, 18 September 2014, “Restoration works for submarine cable faults involves the concerted efforts of all consortium members, and is expected to begin on Wednesday, 1 October 2014 and completed on Monday, 6 October 2014. However, we wish to highlight that these restoration works will be subject to sea conditions, the identification of the actual location of the fault and the challenges presented working at great sea depths and pressure.” That last sentence (in my opinion) appears to be a fancy way of saying: “But umm… we can’t promise you we’ll be able to fix it within that time frame either.”

Image Credit: TMConnects’ Twitter Page

But we shouldn’t be too harsh on critisizing them, as the delay could partially be due to Typhoon Kalmaegi moving across the East Sea. For safety purposes, this typhoon will undoubtedly make any restoration work impossible. This isn’t the first time the cable broke either! It was deemed faulty just a month ago on July 15th 2014 and took 2 weeks to repair.

Although only Telekom is the only company that released a statement regarding this decrease in internet speed, all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are affected. So that means Unifi, Digi, Celcom and all other internet services are going to be slower than usual for the next half of this month, especially if you’re trying to load US-based servers. Telekom appears to be rerouting traffic to reduce the painstakingly long loading times while other service providers are increasing broadband to alleviate the problem.

Image Credit: TMConnects’ Twitter Page

With the internet coming back only in October 6th, I wonder how the First Malaysian Cyber Sale is going to fare! More importantly, how are we going to stream the latest tv episodes and watch all the funny cat videos on youtube with this snail-paced internet?!